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Learning from Education's Consumers: Improving Connecticut's Schools
As we continue to grapple with shoring up our public schools, it is becoming evident that the most powerful source of help has been sidelined. Most of those who participate in the schools are blocked from developing improvements. The schools are notable holdout against the present American emphasis on decentralization, empowerment, and individual initiative in business and other social institutions. Public schools in the United States are financed and managed such that their users; students, parents and even teachers and principals; are excluded from influencing operations. A student is assigned to a school and teacher with the curriculum, hours, and learning style pretty much fixed. Parents are invited to an open house and to bring in cookies for the holiday party but beyond that the implied message is that they should not mess up what the professionals know best about education. One disadvantage of restricting education to a limited subset of educators is that you lose a large portion of the ideas and energy that could be directed at reform. Modern studies of innovation report that consumers of products and services play a surprising large role in developing improvements, typically one half to two thirds of the innovations in an industry. For starters there are many more of them. While producers usually work full time at their products and learn more about the technology underlying the product, buyers have many more opportunities to use the product creatively or think of features that might make it better. It never occurred to the producers of kitty litter, for example, that it might be helpful in giving stuck cars traction in the snow but desperation prompted some motorist to try it and then tell others. Likewise market studies projected that there would be a limited, niche market for disposable diapers; costs dictated that only the wealthy could afford them. But young parents overruled that prediction, judging that the sum of such advantages as eliminating smelly diaper pails and loads of washing more than compensated. We usually do not think of it that way today but a strong consideration in establishing public schools in America in the 19th Century was to suppress the role of the consumer. The idea was that schools were to mainstream immigrant students into the American culture rather than allowing them the choice of maintaining the languages and cultures of their homelands. If you fund the schools publicly such that parents individually can not control what is taught and can only go elsewhere at their own cost you severely limit the choices of parents and students. The difficulty with this approach is that you sabotage the gains that can come from an environment where the self-interest of the parties is harnessed to mutual benefit--such as in the dominant example, the market's interaction of buyers and sellers. This was not a major concern to the progressive reformers whose ideas shaped the modem public schools. They assumed that getting the product out was simply a matter of using the best technology. You put the experts in charge and production became as efficient as possible. This technocracy view contradicts the economists' framework that value is critical. It is not the physical product that is central but rather the degree to which a product or service matches the contours of individuals' preferences. Value is not mere weight or volume or some other physical measure; qualities such as convenience, reliability, comfort, amusement, and timeliness can be very important. And they contribute in varying degrees depending on the particular product or service and the individuals involved. We would consider it strange to pay for our meal in a good restaurant by the pound or to buy a vacation package by the number of miles traveled. The size of our steak or the distance we must travel to get to a resort do affect the cost, of course, but to use such as the only measure would prompt gross distortions. Modem public schools, unfortunately, use a one-size-fits-all, approach. Every child, in effect, receives his steak medium rare whether he likes it or not, and he receives steak even if he is a vegetarian. We know that people have different learning styles; some learn best by reading, while others need to be using their hands; some work best in a structured environment while others can learn more when they have more freedom to follow their own discoveries. Parents have sharply different views as to the ethics and morality that the schools should be inculcating. In addition the mismatch between the uniform product of the schools and the characteristics of individuals prompts social divisiveness. Parents who want the schools to promote traditional, conservative values, for example, pressure schools to shape their reading material and curriculum in that direction. Of course, that runs counter to some other parents who wish to push in the opposite direction. The basic problem is that both sides can not be simultaneously satisfied; only one choice is allowed for the entire system so conflict is endemic. Compromise, decentralization, toleration, and other tactics that help a pluralistic society function reasonably smoothly are blocked from working here. In addition, the irreconcilable opinions slip over into the political sector, as politicians sense opportunities to win credit by imposing policies on the schools. Thus American public schools are mandated to teach subjects, observe holidays, promote causes, and generally abide by constraints that reduce their effectiveness. The political dictates that are forced upon public schools are seldom thought out or tested and sometimes the temptation to employ political power directly reduces educational effectiveness. Sadly, however, that avenue of change does not look all that bad compared to the existing alternative, innovations developed within the school system itself. Because change from the demand side by parents and teachers is blocked, the initiative has to come from the supply side, the administrators and curriculum planners of each school district. This has given us a stream of disappointing new approaches; new math, ungraded classes, self-esteem, and so on that faded away as their ineffectiveness became apparent. The primary weakness was that these ideas were just that; they had not been tested and refined and put to the test of consumer value because consumers were excluded. Ironically, the quality of the initial programs initially advanced by the schools bureaucracies is probably better than that offered by participants on the demand side. The difference is that the environment the latter works in compels their ideas to be reformed, tested, and polished until they pass the ultimate test of consumer value. It follows that a central force in introducing quality and innovation into education is to begin making the demand side effective. That can be accomplished by reforms that give the consumers and "retail level' providers--the teachers and principals--real influence in the system. The most direct and effective way to introduce that now is to give parents vouchers; the right to send their children to whatever school they believe is best. Vouchers separate the public funding of education from the public pro Vision of education. A voucher allows all children to be given an equal Opportunity in education--including appropriate adjustments for the extra expenses of serving handicapped children--but it frees children from being captive to one school. In other words, vouchers provide equality without creating a monopoly. Vouchers would introduce competition among schools, forcing them to improve their programs rather than blaming shortcomings on the students as is common now. Schools would be more concerned about what parents wanted from education and would experiment within their programs to that end. Schools that pleased their clients would gain more Voucher payments; others would lose revenue. Even those schools that are not innovative themselves would borrow the methods that appeared successful elsewhere. They aid the students that are "left behind"--a term often used pejoratively by those that oppose the idea of competition in education. Even if a student is unaware of the opportunity to change schools or if the advantages to him of staying still outweigh the costs of moving, all share in the gain from the diffusion of better methods in demand-driven schools. A good example of how helpful vouchers could be is the seemingly unlikely case of school buildings. Most folks give the subject little thought assuming that what we have currently is about how schools always must be organized so that the buildings would remain pretty much the same after any reform. But public schools now are organized for the convenience of administrators, not as a service industry would be for students. For the last 50 years American public schools have been consolidating with the resulting number of districts failing by a factor of four even as the number of students has doubled. School officials contend this lends itself to more choices in courses and programs within schools, particularly high schools. In practice, however, this reduces the alternatives among districts in a typical area, giving families fewer choices among school authorities. It is ironic that while Americans generally believe that monopolies are bad-sufficiently so that we send the government antitrust agencies after any industry or firm that threatens to become a monopoly-this particular trend toward monopolization has commonly been considered an advantage. We can not anticipate all the variations of schools that might develop if vouchers allowed the participants to use their full ingenuity and energy but it is clear that schools would become more varied and, on average, smaller. We would soon see "schools within schools" as the latent preferences for approaches to education now suppressed by the public schools were unleashed. Some classroom routines would become more structured while others would be relaxed. Principals and counselors would seek to match parents with the style of an individual classroom as they sought voucher-payers. Soon this differentiation would move toward decentralization, as it became apparent that many of these classrooms could be relocated comparatively cheaply, and in some cases, actually operate for less. Take, for example, a business that finds space for a classroom or two in the building. This saves employees with children separate trips to school making employment there that much more attractive. Thus that also benefits the business; as at least some of the costs of the room are offset by an improved supply of labor. Once the consumers of education are freed to seek out such mutually beneficial arrangements it seems very likely that others will also be detected and developed. While public school officials have dug in their heels against vouchers and the general public has yet to be persuaded, individual Americans have begun turning to them to improve education. That effort is growing very rapidly with about 17,000 students already participating nationally and commitments of funds insuring that number will at least triple within two years. In Connecticut programs are well underway in Hartford and Bridgeport. Most of these scholarships are used by children from poorer families that often means from neighborhoods with poor schools. The initial results are very encouraging; better scores on standardized tests and more satisfied parents. Most of the vouchers are for less than half the per pupil cost of public schools so they represent the best of all possible worlds, better education for disadvantaged students at less cost. As these programs expand they are bound to challenge the education establishment's argument that vouchers would only bleed money from the public schools. They offer a tangible example that the alternatives that we have not seen--because the public schools held a monopoly on the funds--can work well. Another variant of a voucher is what is known as school choice. Most folks understand this as the freedom to enroll in any public school but the early programs have tried a wide array of designs. The first large experiment, that in District 4 in upper Manhattan, was restricted to public schools but the more recent, well publicized case in Milwaukee allowed students to use their publicly funded vouchers to attend private and parochial schools. Another common pattern is called "controlled choice" that proves to be an oxymoron in practice as well as concept. It only allows transfers if the effect is to reduce racial imbalances. Unfortunately this restriction reduces the incentives for improvement from the demand-side that choice is structured to foster. This compounds the barriers within public schools that administrative practices often have already erected against choice. For example, while schools may allow students to transfer among schools they often restrict the money that should follow them. Schools that attract more students find that they are penalized by receiving less than proportionate funding while schools that lose students are rewarded for their failure by continuing to receive a good part of the money once paid for the departed students. Other techniques would also free the demand side of education some to pursue innovation. While most would have less leverage than vouchers they still could exert considerable force for improvements in American education as it currently exists. Charter schools are a good example. They are the most rapidly growing force for consumer choice in education today. About three-quarters of the States, including Connecticut, have enacted effective charter school programs. More than 1000 such schools are operating with several hundred being added each year. Charter schools have more independence than is typical within the public school system. They are initiated by teachers or parents rather than by the school district planners and are given more autonomy in developing their own curriculum. But they still depend on public funding and that channel has been the principal means by which opponents of reform have sought to restrain them. Another program that might have some influence for reform is magnet schools. These have often been discussed and not infrequently tried for several decades. They are planned and funded by the public schools attempting to develop programs that are sufficiently appealing to attract students from a wider area than the usual attendance area. The majority of such efforts have been established to redress racial balances and thus, sadly, gains from the academic program have often been dissipated by enrollment restrictions. In addition, by virtue of being designed from above by school administrators magnet schools typically suffer the usual drawbacks that comes from ignoring the demand side. A large portion of such schools has proved to have poor magnetic powers but, unfortunately, they have little incentive to improve their attractiveness so their diservice languishes on for years.
Gerald Gunderson is the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor at Trinity College and a Board member of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, a Connecticut research and educational institute.
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The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is a nonpartisan educational and research organization founded more than two decades ago. Today, the Yankee Institute's mission is to "promote economic opportunity through lower taxes and new ideas for better government in Connecticut." The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is classified by the IRS as a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Contributions are deductible to the extent allowed by law.
